


they are two alone, they are

by indigostohelit



Category: Narcos (TV), Narcos: Mexico (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Developing Friendships, Dirty Talk, Jealousy, M/M, Negotiations, Overhearing Sex, Power Dynamics, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:26:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22871707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: “Looking for someone?” says a voice.Amado startles. The voice laughs, softly; then there’s a faint scrape, and a match flares. What had been darkness and glassy rain-shadow becomes a silhouette, a body, and then the face of Pacho Herrera, leaning towards a little flame to light his cigarette.After the failed meeting in Panama, Miguel and Amado stay the night in the hotel. Unable to sleep, Amado finds himself engaged in a different kind of negotiation.
Relationships: Amado Carrillo Fuentes/Hélmer "Pacho" Herrera, Amado Carrillo Fuentes/Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
Comments: 13
Kudos: 98





	they are two alone, they are

**Author's Note:**

> For the group chat. God I love you guys. This is based on the fictional text of Narcos: Mexico, and not on any real people living or dead; some dialogue is in English and some in Spanish, but it should all be considered "canonically" in Spanish. Title from Crosby, Stills & Nash.
> 
> Complicated consent warning here for voyeurism where all characters are willing, but the voyeur is not aware of important details of the sexual situation. Warning also for a lot of smoking, and that these guys' flirting is just deeply weird.

There are a dozen good reasons for Amado not to be able to sleep, and he wishes he believed in any of them. The air is wet and heavy, rain fogging down silent outside his window; not quite storming, not quite dry. None of the quiet norteño city noises he’s deliberately accustomed himself to over the past years—the hum of cars in motion, wind dry-rasping through the atmosphere, horns and keening sirens—to sing the usual cold comfort. On the grass of the patio, a frog is hiccuping low and slick, asking in a hoarse language for something he doesn’t understand; the insects are in whispered conference, just on the edge of hearing. This time yesterday, Amado was on a plane bound for Panama, and Miguel was sleeping beside him.

One more night here. Then they’ll bid goodbye to the Cali delegation, and turn their backs on each other, and Amado will walk away from deals and dreaming and godforsaken neutral ground. Another night, and it’ll be morning. And then Amado will be done with this endless, worn-out day; once he can just close his fucking eyes.

He pushes the sheets back on the borrowed bed, and sits up. The urge is in him, a bone in his throat: to get water, to find the kitchens, to do—something. Step outside into the sea-thick air, and wait for lightning to strike. He steps into his pants and shrugs a shirt on, without bothering to button it, and slides his feet into the slippers he’s left by the door.

The Federation’s people are in one part of the hotel, scattered along a few wide hallways with arching ceilings and tall windows that overlook the patio; Cali’s are in another, somewhere Amado hasn’t marked. They discomfort him, the Cali men. He understands the point of his own presence here, of course. He understands what he was brought to this city to do. But without Guerra, he finds himself not acting as half of a flanking maneuver, but looking to his counterparts; and in those men he isn’t mirrored in some trusted lieutenant—what lieutenant?—but in the blank-eyed sicarios with hands on their guns, moving like a school of jungle fish in human skins, smiling without humor and moving without thought, and on whom their employer’s eyes do not linger.

He hesitates, at the door beside his own. It’s shut. When he bends his head, he can hear, very faintly, the faint creak of floorboards.

So he’s awake, too. Amado presses his lips together: awake, and pacing. _Then get some_ , he had snapped at Amado in the elevator, and turned away; but the seventy tons must be weighing on his mind, just as heavily as they are on Amado’s.

Maybe, if Miguel were a different sort of man, Amado would knock on the door. If he were a different sort of man, Amado would say, _I heard you, let me come in_ ; if he were a different sort of man, Amado would say, _what you promised me on the airplane, I still want that. What I felt then, I still feel it. I know you’re frightened. So am I._

He hesitates for a moment more. Then he shrugs his shirt over his shoulders and continues silently down the hallway, towards the staircase at its end.

It’s easy to get lost in the hotel. He manages it after only a few minutes of trying: down one staircase, around another, on some floor or sub-floor that’s nowhere near where the hotel owners put him. Meeting rooms; reception rooms; hallways, closets, suites left empty with their doors swinging open. The insects are chattering louder now, laughing under their breath. The frog’s mournful voice has vanished: too far away, or gotten what he wanted, or given up on satisfaction altogether.

He emerges into another conference room, empty and bare, adjacent to the patio. The rain is streaking the window, spilling patterns in silver over the dark carpet and the long thin table in its center. Amado crosses to the glass and looks out. In the tall shadowed trees, there’s no sign of anything living: hummingbirds asleep in their nests, insects swarming invisibly under the leaves. The electric light illuminates lemon-green, in patches, and blackness. No shapes.

“Looking for someone?” says a voice.

Amado startles. The voice laughs, softly; then there’s a faint scrape, and a match flares. What had been darkness and glassy rain-shadow becomes a silhouette, a body, and then the face of Pacho Herrera, leaning towards a little flame to light his cigarette.

“Do you want one?” he says.

Amado hesitates. “All right,” he says, and, by the dull red light of the ember, finds and accepts the cigarette from between Herrera’s fingers. He reaches for his own lighter, but Herrera is faster: he lifts another match, already lit, and Amado has no choice but to bend towards Herrera’s proffered hand, pause, and breathe in.

“Who would I be looking for?” he says, when the cigarette is warm in his hand. “I thought everyone would be in bed.”

“You aren’t,” says Herrera. He’s leaning against the conference table. Like Amado, he’s in loose pants and slippers; unlike Amado, there’s a silk robe hanging off his shoulders, dark and patterned with what might be snapdragons.

Amado shrugs. “I can’t sleep,” he says. “Too warm. The rain. Frogs and birds, in the garden.”

Herrera looks at him out of the corner of his eye. The reflection of the cigarette end is flickering in his pupil, orange and red. “That’s right,” he says. “You’re from the desert, aren’t you.”

“Sinaloa,” says Amado, “originally. Like Félix. Ciudad Juárez, now.”

Herrera says nothing. Amado looks away. “I thought I would go to the hotel kitchen,” he says. “See what I could find.”

“You found me,” says Herrera, and grins at him, brief and very white. “Better than warm milk. What a comfort to you.”

Amado feels his mouth twitch, not quite against his will. He knows Miguel’s feelings towards Herrera, the cold, professional, seething resentment; on an impersonal level, he shares it. On a personal level, he’s human. He saw the way Herrera looked at him in the meeting room. There’s a part of Amado in every moment—there always has been—that sits above the whole, and watches, and thinks, no matter what the rest of him is feeling; and when Miguel had asked for the seventy tons, and Amado’s mind and soul had been screaming at him and at Miguel, and running forward and backwards to airplanes and seizures and borders and weight, that flat little separate part had said, quite coolly: _Take care how he’s watching you, Pacho Herrera. Pay attention to his eyes._

“What a comfort to you,” he says, “finding me.”

Pacho considers that; then he looks Amado up and down, slow and deliberate. Amado tries not to shiver, under the heat of that gaze. He doesn’t look away.

“I do like you,” says Pacho. “You know that, don’t you.”

“I guessed,” says Amado.

“I can’t say I much like him, though,” says Pacho. “Your—partner.” Amado can’t keep the wince off his face; Pacho sees it, and his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Oh,” he says, “don’t take offense. We’re gentlemen, in Cali. I wouldn’t dare to let personal feelings interfere with good business.”

Amado is certain Pacho understands what he’s doing, the bait, the deliberate misunderstanding, the little hitch in his voice before _partner,_ and he’s almost certain that Pacho knows he knows. He hasn’t played this kind of game in years; it’s like stretching sore muscles.

“So what about Juan Nepomuceno Guerra?” he says.

“Oh,” says Pacho, his eyebrows raised, “that’s _very_ good business.”

“No,” says Amado, “I mean—do you like him?”

“Ah,” says Pacho. The ember of his cigarette flares. “Yes,” he says, after some time. “We like Don Guerra. He’s a gentleman, too.”

That’s not what Amado had asked. That’s interesting.

“I’m not much of a gentleman,” he says.

Pacho’s mouth moves, a little. In the darkness it’s hard to read his smile: amused or thoughtful, perfunctory or predatory. “There’s a time and a place for manners,” he says. “A man who tries to be a gentleman all the time is—fighting with windmills.”

“And me on the back of a donkey,” says Amado, “following him.”

“You said it,” says Pacho mildly.

“But there’s no one here to hear it,” says Amado, “except you and me."

“No,” says Pacho. The ember flares again. Amado can see him lower the cigarette, tap the ash into the little glass tray on the table; then he says, “Would you like there to be?”

Amado stares at him. Pacho is slouched against the conference table, the cigarette dying between his fingers. The rain-light shades his eyes in burnished tin, and he isn't moving. Amado has the heady, unpleasant sensation that he’s being allowed to look his fill.

He says, “I should tell him about this entire conversation.”

“Should you?” says Pacho. “Why?”

“Don’t play it like that,” says Amado. “I’m not interested.”

Pacho laughs a little, under his breath. “Fine,” he says. “Anything to keep you interested, hmm? You won’t tell him.”

Amado says, “How do you know?”

“How do I know?” says Pacho. “What a good question.” He taps one finger on the table, nearly idly. “If you were going to tell him,” he says, “you would have asked me why Guerra was good business, and not your Federation. You wouldn’t have asked me whether I liked the man.” The cigarette is out; he grinds it into the ashtray, a faint motion in the shadows, dark paper and pale fingers. “He would never have asked who I _liked,”_ he says softly. “Do you think he cares?”

“But you didn’t answer me,” says Amado. Pacho smiles; he presses, “I asked if _you_ liked him. You said— _we_ —”

“If I were you, I would take the time to learn,” says Pacho, “how to decide when to be one person, and when to be half of a whole.”

Amado drops his cigarette on the carpet.

Pacho, once again, is quicker than he is: he grinds it into ash with the toe of his shoe before Amado can move. His eyes go to Amado’s face; Amado isn’t sure what’s written there, but whatever it is makes Pacho’s eyes go shuttered, without warning.

“Or maybe you wouldn’t,” he says. “My mistake. Carry him everything I’ve said if you like, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. There won’t be much to tell.”

Amado doesn’t move.

“Why are you awake?” he says.

Pacho, who a moment ago had seemed poised to flee, goes still against the table. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says, after some time. 

Amado exhales. “ _You_ were looking for someone,” he says. “That’s why you asked. Me, or him?” 

“Ah,” says Pacho. The tension is winding out of him, slow, like a clock. He looks Amado up and down again, deliberately; this time Amado does shiver, and sees the flicker in Pacho’s expression when he does. “Now that _is_ the right question.” 

Amado licks his lips, and watches Pacho’s eyes glint.  
  
“If Félix had been the one wandering,” he says, “and you had met him, here, instead of me—”

“Almost,” says Pacho. “Try again.”

The echo of Miguel’s fury is swift and brutal, and its claws are in Amado’s throat before he can think. Miguel hates condescension; Miguel hates to be tested, and especially by this man. He prefers, whenever possible, to cheat. If Miguel were the man in this room, he would—snap; he would say something too-clever; he would walk away, and close the door behind him. If Miguel—

“If I were _you_ ,” he says, slowly, “and Félix had come wandering to meet _me_ —”

Pacho makes a low, pleased noise.

Amado isn’t Miguel. He likes to be tested. He likes to succeed.

“If I were you,” he says, “and Miguel had come wandering to meet me, I would—I would want to know what he was thinking. What he was feeling. If he was—angry, or afraid. And if he was afraid, I would try to enrage him, and if he was angry, I would try to frighten him, and if he was neither, I would push him, talk him into them. I would search for something that unsettled him, until—”

“Until?” says Pacho.

Amado’s mouth is open to say it: _Until he lost control._

He shuts it again.

“But you met me, instead,” he says.

“I did,” says Pacho. “How fortunate.”

“Fortunate,” says Amado. “Was it?”

“Of course it was,” says Pacho, and smiles at him. “I like you.”

In the absence of the ember-light, the planes of Pacho’s face seem to shift. His features, when Amado tries to focus on them, are only visible through the flickering movement of the rain.

“If I were trying to make Félix angry,” Amado says, “I would show him I had an advantage over him. That I’d gotten something he wanted, something he cared about. Something that belonged to me, that he'd—thought he had safely locked away.”

“And what in the world would that be?” says Pacho. He’s smirking openly, now. “What on earth could I have that Félix would envy me for?"

Amado looks at him. He can't think Amado will say Juan Nepomuceno Guerra’s name. “If you were in my position,” he says, “how would you answer that?”

“Ah,” says Pacho. “Let's say—gentlemanliness. Manners.” Amado hears him exhale, a half-laugh. “Good breeding.”

Amado considers this.

Then he says, “Give me another cigarette.”

Pacho’s hand moves automatically to his pocket; then it stops. He looks at Amado, very hard.

“I don’t mean to ruin the fun,” he says, “but I have to ask. What you want from me—” He stops.

“That I don't have?” says Amado. “A cigarette? Or—gentlemanliness?”

Pacho’s smile, when it spreads across his face again, is wide and pleased. “Thank you,” he says, and he tilts his head. “Give me another cigarette—what?”

Amado takes a step towards him, and watches those metal-bright eyes go a little darker. “Please,” he says, and doesn’t bother to hold out an empty hand. “Pacho, please.”

“Well,” says Pacho. “You ask so nicely. How can I refuse?”

He moves towards Amado, slowly, giving him time to step back. When Amado doesn’t, his face goes sharp. He leans forward, and presses his mouth to Amado, hot and soft.

He smells like smoke and sweet ash. Amado must, too; he opens up and lets Pacho taste him, cautious at first, and then curious, more decided. His hand is in Amado's hair, his thumb at the soft skin just below Amado’s ear, then stroking down, to just over the artery; Amado shivers, involuntary, and Pacho makes a little satisfied noise into his mouth, and carefully, gently detaches.

His face has lost none of its amusement. “You’re a difficult man to negotiate with, Amado Carrillo Fuentes,” he says. “I’ll remember that.”

Amado looks sidelong at him. “Are you offering me a compliment or an insult?”

“Oh,” says Pacho. “I'm offering.” He tucks his hands into the pockets of his robe. “Your bedroom is nearer than mine," he says, almost idly.

“Estás fresco,” says Amado. His heartrate has picked up. It’s been a long time since that was a pleasant sensation.

“Más que una rosa,” says Pacho, mouth curling. “Please, don’t think I’m making designs on your... modesty.” He looks, pointedly, at Amado’s open shirt. “I’d only say that I like the—hmm. The audience in your rooms, better than the audience here.”

Amado follows his gaze. The patio is a blur of green and silver. He can see nothing moving in it; which is to say, anything moving in it can’t be seen.

“So you know where my bedroom is,” he says.

Pacho says, “Would you prefer that I lead the way?”

Amado isn’t as lost as he thought; Pacho turns two corners before he recognizes a staircase and knows, without conscious thought, his way back to his bed. He follows, though, a beat behind Pacho’s footsteps. He prefers it to having him at his back.

 _It makes us untouchable_ , Miguel had said to him on the airplane. Another of his lost dreams, then, in more ways than one. They're piling up tonight.

“Tell me something,” he says.

“All right,” says Pacho. “What would you like to know?”

Amado rolls the words around on his tongue for a few moments. “If Félix were here, instead of me,” he says, eventually, “would you have kissed him?”

“Give me some credit,” says Pacho. He sounds amused, but not surprised. “I told you I didn’t even like him.”

“You did,” says Amado, and hesitates. “You didn’t say you were disinterested.”

They’re reaching the top of the last staircase, now, and the long arched hallway stretches before them. Pacho pauses for a moment at the landing, Amado just behind him. “I’ll tell you,” he says, “if you tell me something in return.”

“What?” says Amado.

“If you were me,” says Pacho, “if Félix had come to you in the middle of the night, and said to you, _please_ —would you have kissed him?”

Amado can’t breathe for a long moment. When he has his body back, he whispers, “Keep your voice down.”

“Why?” says Pacho. They're both in the hallway, now; Amado can see his own suite at its end. Between it and them, there's only one door.

“I told you not to play it like that,” says Amado. “You _know_ why.”

“I’m not,” says Pacho. “You were the one who brought it up.” Amado looks at him blankly; he says, “Downstairs. _No one here to hear it_. You said that; not me.”

“That was downstairs,” says Amado. “No one was there. Here—” His brain catches up to his mouth, a moment too late. He _had_ told Pacho: _There's_ _no one here to hear it; except you and me_. And Pacho had said, _No_ , and asked him—

He stops in front of his door. The key is biting into the skin of his palm.

“Is this about me at all?” he says.

“Don’t be a hypocrite,” says Pacho calmly, and leans in to kiss him.

Amado resists, for a moment. The taste of it is sour on his tongue: leftover fear, wounded pride, and—fine; hypocrisy. He does _like_ Pacho. He thinks, alarmingly, that he might like Pacho as much as Pacho likes him. He’s just—what was it he’d said on the stairs? Dislike isn’t the same as disinterest? There’s a corollary to that, equal and opposite, and it’s not one that flatters either of them.

All right. He goes pliant, kisses back, and feels Pacho’s hand curl possessive and pleased around his shoulder. There’s no point to being angry, with Pacho or himself. It’s neither of their faults that he wants this.

He lets Pacho push him gently backwards, against the wood of the door. The silk of his robe is rasping against Amado's arms; the scent of smoke is still in it, faded from its earlier thick acridity, so that only a faint warm bitterness remains. Underneath is what must be Pacho's cologne, fresh wood and something clean. Pacho hums into his mouth, and scrapes his nails a little against Amado's neck, a promise.

“Let me in,” he says, soft, into Amado's ear.

Amado turns in his arms to fit the key into the lock. When the door swings open, Pacho kisses the back of his neck, and eases around his body. For a moment he's a shadow by Amado's bed; then the lamp on the nightstand clicks, and he's illuminated from behind, like a vision from some bad church hymnal. He's watching Amado, his expression unreadable.

Amado steps in, and kicks the door shut behind him. There's silence, after the lock clicks. Pacho opens his mouth, but Amado shakes his head, and holds up a hand; Pacho's eyes narrow, and then go flat and amused with understanding.

“Is he?” he says, so softly that Amado can barely hear him.

Amado closes his eyes. It takes a minute; he fears, briefly, that nothing is there. Then he hears it, faint but unmistakable: the slow shuffle of footsteps, on the other side of the wall from Pacho.

He opens his eyes and nods. Pacho smiles, wide.

“Come here,” he says. His voice is very clear.

Amado goes. He shrugs off his shirt as he does, unbuttons his pants and steps out of them before he's halfway to the bed; Pacho leans back against the nightstand and regards him, blatantly appreciative.

“Don't be histrionic,” says Amado. He is flattered—helplessly flattered—but he doesn't want Pacho to know how easily he's managed that. “You must have a hundred like me waiting for you in Colombia.”

“If I had even ten like you waiting for me in Cali,” says Pacho, with every appearance of sincerity, “I'd never leave the city.”

Amado snorts a laugh, unable to stop himself. Pacho's serious-eyed a moment longer; then his face cracks into a smile. “Didn't I tell you to come here, Amado?” he says. “I don't like to be kept waiting.”

That _tone_. Amado knows this is half-performance, but his body doesn't; he moves towards Pacho without thinking, as if he’s magnetized. Pacho's eyes go darker almost immediately; his smile shifts. Amado can only look at it for a few moments before he has to glance away.

“Well?” he says. His bravado doesn't sound, even to himself, particularly believable.

Pacho straightens, slowly and languidly, and moves forward. He says into Amado's ear, quietly: “I'd like to hear you enjoy this.”

For the first few minutes, Amado can't think of anything. Pacho's mouth on his is hot, relentless; he kisses Amado like he has all the time in the world. Like there's no possibility Amado will stop him. It's so good that Amado is breathless; if he ever had a voice, he doesn't know where it's gone.

It's only when Pacho's nails dig into his shoulder, pointed, that even half his mind comes back to him. He pulls away from Pacho, terribly reluctant, and says, trying to make it audible, “God—”

“Hmm,” says Pacho. Amado can feel his smile against his jawline.

“God,” says Amado, clearer. “You're so—” Pacho's teeth are at his neck. He lets his eyes fall shut, and digs his nails into his palm. “ _God._ Don't stop.”

Pacho laughs, raspy. Amado thinks, wildly, of the tiger in Guadalajara: if he'd walked up to it, and knelt down, and eased its jaws around his throat.

“What do you want?” he says.

“What do I want?” says Pacho. His warm, clever hands are curving around Amado's back, now; one has dipped, just a little, under the cloth of Amado's boxers. “You tell me. What can I have?” A little lower, now. Amado shifts, unconscious, mindlessly wanting, and feels Pacho's breath hiss out. “What will you let me do to you?”

It's so hard to make himself think. Amado licks his lips, tries to collect his scattered mind from where it's lingering with Pacho's mouth, Pacho's hands.

“Can you—” he says, and flicks his gaze towards the connecting wall.

Pacho pauses, for a moment, his eyes cool with concentration. Amado breathes, and listens. From the other room, there's the faint creak of floorboards.

Pacho hears it, too. He looks at Amado, and raises his eyebrows: a challenge.

Amado ought to turn him down. He bites at his lower lip. Then he meets Pacho's gaze, and says in the hoarsest voice he can manage that can still be heard on the other side of the wall, “Anything. You can do anything to me. Don't stop.”

Pacho's nails dig into his skin, briefly, ten points of sharp, clear pain. His mouth is a little open, but for once Amado isn't paying attention. From the other room, the sounds of movement have gone absolutely quiet.

“Ah,” says Pacho, into Amado's ear. And then, louder: “Why don't you get on the bed for me.”

There's lotion in the bedside drawer. Amado watches Pacho strip, collarbones and lean muscle, a few faint brown freckles scattered on his shoulders. When Pacho turns to look at him, he flicks open the cap of the lotion bottle with his thumb.

“We have to be quieter,” he says, still ragged, but pitched to carry. “I don't know who can hear us.”

Pacho briefly covers his mouth with his hand and shuts his eyes. “Whatever you like, Amado,” he says, after a few moments, the laughter not quite gone from his voice. “Sit back, a little, against the headboard. That's right. Spread your legs for me.”

Amado breathes out, and keeps breathing out. It's hard, purposefully relaxing himself like this. Even when he was younger, long before Juárez and even Guadalajara, he only did this in snatched moments, a rare indulgence; it's shockingly sweet, Pacho's fingers inside him, like relearning the taste of honey. Pacho moves, presses, _almost_ , and then—there—and Amado's body jolts, and he blinks sightlessly at the ceiling, mouthing he hardly knows what.

“Please,” he says clearly, “more,” and when Pacho's fingers curl inside him again, “no, Pacho—fuck me. You can fuck me, I'll let you. Please.” Overacting? A little, maybe—it doesn't matter. He _does_ want it, he wants it badly, it won't harm him to say all he means, for once. To admit how hungry he is, and be heard.

It's been ages. The burn of it isn't familiar to him any more, but it's still good, so good; Amado feels his hips move, his body opening up, knowing what it wants where he's forgotten. Pacho's hesitant at first when he presses into Amado, careful; then, when Amado looks wordlessly at him, he begins to move faster, harder, and Amado digs his nails into his palm, lets his body ride through the stretch, the ache.

Pacho slows, after a few minutes. He murmurs, very quietly, into Amado's ear, “Do you think he's—”

“Oh,” says Amado, and turns his face blindly aside. Now that he's thinking about it, he can't _stop_ thinking about it: Miguel on his bed, bare feet and shirtsleeves, pants rucked down and legs spread open. Biting his lip, maybe, to keep quiet.

He and Miguel—they never have. Not together. With whores, sometimes, in the same brothels; one night, too-hot and too-drunk, flush with some bloody victory Amado can't recall, in the same room—and Amado had looked; how could he not look? The way Miguel moved, the way his mouth had fallen open, the way his hips stuttered up. He'd thought, for a moment, that Miguel had looked too. No; he hadn't thought. He'd known. But then Miguel had closed his eyes, and called the girl some long-forgotten name; and Amado had exhaled hard, and looked away.

“He might,” he says to Pacho. He shouldn't. He's given Pacho enough already. But, God— “He might—pretend he doesn't want to. He might try to stop himself.”

“Do you want him to stop himself?” whispers Pacho, kisses his neck.

He almost does. He can see it, when he closes his eyes: Miguel still in the darkness, unable to stop listening, hard enough that it hurts. “No,” he says. “No. I want—I want him to—” He can't finish the sentence.

“Then why don't you be loud for me,” Pacho says, and pushes in again, hard. “Hmm, cariño? Give him something to listen to.”

That isn't difficult. None of this is difficult, though Amado almost wishes it were. He groans, low in his throat, and rolls his hips down into Pacho's. “God,” he says, and knows it carries, “God, mother of Christ, that's so good. Please, don't stop. Please—”

“Please what?” says Pacho, rough. Nothing of coldness in him now; his eyes are hot and bright. Amado hesitates.

“Please,” he says, “talk to me. Tell me—” He shakes his head, unable to say what he means, but Pacho inhales, and smiles a tight little smile, and presses into him.

“You're gorgeous,” he says. “God, you're gorgeous. Do you know how you look, when you're falling apart like this?” Amado groans again; Pacho presses a kiss to his mouth, and laughs softly into it. “No,” he says. “How could you? Don't worry, Amado. I have you. I've got you. You're all mine.”

In the other room, something thumps to the floor, hard.

Pacho goes still; he looks down at Amado, eyebrows raised. “Quiet a second,” he says, clearly. He's smiling. “I heard something.”

Amado can barely think, but he blinks hard, tries to get some air into his lungs. “It was nothing,” he says, after a minute. “Don't stop.”

“Are you sure?” says Pacho.

“Don't push it,” mutters Amado, and then, louder, “I'm sure. Please, Pacho.”

“Whatever you like,” says Pacho. He's propping himself up on one hand; the other finds Amado's cock, so aching-sensitive when he touches it that Amado nearly shouts, nearly tells him to stop. His smile is slipping; it's leaner, now, concentrated. He murmurs, “Do you think he's still trying to stop himself? Now?”

There's no reason Amado should know the answer. “No,” he says, anyway, under his breath. “No. He's—he'll try to be quiet, now, but he's—” On the other side of the wall, a bone-certainty: Miguel's eyes glittering, his hair falling over his forehead. His hand moving on his own cock. Is he trying to go fast, get it over with? Or is he lingering? Is he touching himself slowly, closing his eyes, straining for the sound of Amado's voice?

Pacho's breath is short. The smile has slid off his face entirely. He bends down, and whispers into Amado's ear, nearly inaudible: “What if he was the one fucking you like this?”

Amado comes hard.

Pacho keeps fucking into him, fast, stuttering strokes. His teeth are in his lower lip, his expression fierce and far away; he gasps, gasps, and then he's coming, too, inside Amado, his arm giving way, his lithe warm body pressing along Amado's, his cheek against Amado's cheek.

He stays there a moment; Amado can feel his chest, heaving. Then he grunts, and pulls out, and rolls to the other side of the bed. His eyes are closed; his face is slack.

Amado lays there, letting himself come gradually back into his body, skin to muscle to lungs to heart. The room is still golden with lamplight. It's strangely incongruous with the whispering of the insects, out in the darkness. Amado feels boneless, wrung out, like a rag. When he listens, there isn't even the faintest shifting of bedsprings from the other side of the wall.

“Tell me something,” he says, quiet.

Pacho's eyes open at once. They're cool, again, and utterly satisfied. “We tried that on the way here,” he says. “It didn't work very well, last time.”

Amado huffs out a breath. “God,” he says. “You aren't much for afterglow.”  
  
“What did you expect?” says Pacho.

Amado smiles, a little. “An advantage,” he admits.

Pacho stretches, sighs. “An answer for an answer,” he says, after some time. “I think that’s fair.”

“All right,” says Amado, and turns his head on the pillow, and chews his lip for a moment while he thinks.

“I asked you, earlier,” he says, still quiet, “if you were looking for me or for—him.”

“Yes,” says Pacho. “Is that your question?”

“No,” says Amado. “No, because—whichever one of us came to you, you would have gotten the same thing. Wouldn’t you? Don’t answer that.” Pacho doesn’t have to; his mouth is curling up at one side. “Miguel angry,” says Amado, “and able to do nothing about it, and you, knowing you’d—won an advantage. Something important to him. Something he—” He stops.

“Yes,” says Pacho. “You can have that one for free.”

“So then why,” says Amado, “if the answer was the same either way, why did you tell me that was the right question to ask?”

“Really?” says Pacho. He sounds surprised. “You don’t know?”

“Is that your question?” says Amado, sharp.

“It shouldn’t have to be,” says Pacho. He props himself up on one elbow, and looks at Amado, hard. Amado looks back: the cold, thoughtful face, the penny-dark eyes, the almost cruel edge of loveliness in his features. Whatever Pacho sees in his, it makes his mouth curl down again, and he lays back down on the pillow, his face turned towards Amado’s.

“The point wasn’t that I thought there was a difference between the two of you, Amado Carrillo Fuentes,” he says softly. “The point was that if you were asking the question, _you_ did.”

It’s always a shock, to be outplayed. Amado wishes that was why his stomach felt so hollow.

He turns his face away. “All right,” he says, after a while. “Fair is fair. I owe you an answer.”

It’s a long time before he hears Pacho stir. Amado doesn’t turn to look at him; he watches the shape of the lamplight on the wall, faint and unmoving.

Pacho says, almost gently, “Amado, why can’t you sleep?”

Amado rolls over. All the sharp humor is gone from Pacho’s face. He looks softer without it; Amado might even mistake him for human.

He considers lying. Fair is fair; but death is fair, and justice is fair, and Amado’s no friend to either of them. But the cold little part of him that stands aside and watches, which has so often told him to set aside honor in the past, isn’t telling him to equivocate; it isn’t telling him to excuse, or to deceive. It’s looking at Pacho’s eyes.

“The truth?” he says.

“If you want,” says Pacho. “If you'd like to.”

It’s like some taut string inside him has been plucked, hard. Amado closes his eyes, and says it, at last, to the space between them: “I’m homesick.”

“For Juárez?” says Pacho. “Or for Sinaloa?”

Amado says nothing. After all the ways Pacho has managed to outmaneuver him tonight, it’s a genuine shock to hear, asked so bluntly, the wrong question.

Pacho doesn’t ask again. After a few minutes, Amado feels him stretch again, the bed creaking underneath his weight.

“I can go,” he says, “whenever you say so.”

“All right,” says Amado. “You should, before morning. If we were really trying to hide—he wakes up early. Before dawn.” He lets his eyes flicker open. “We shouldn’t talk again.”

“Now?” says Pacho carefully.

“No,” says Amado. “Not right now.”

“All right,” says Pacho.

He reaches up and clicks the lamp. After a little while, in the darkness, Amado feels an arm settle, warm and heavy, over his shoulders.

It’s very easy to fall asleep.


End file.
